Monday, March 20, 2017
540 - Swinging for the Fences
Spirituality
Column No. 540
March 21, 2017
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary
March 21, 2017
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary
Swinging for the Fences
By
Bob Walters
Public opinion polls these days fairly pulsate with bad news for the
Christian faith.
Endless
journalists and authors predict looming cultural destruction. Political and media savants pontificate daily
that civilization’s sky is falling because of the godless “other side” (liberal
vs. conservative, etc.). Theological
sages insist the church must expand; the church must contract; the church must
withdraw; the church is irrelevant.
Woe is us! God is losing! “Nones” are ascendant! America’s moral compass is lost. Millennials don’t do church. Boomers spoiled their children. Academia has gone secular. “Love God and others” is now “If it feels
good do it (with whomever you want).”
Hysteria reigns, possibly because personal
“opinion” is now culturally sovereign having conversationally replaced divine
“truth” almost everywhere. That doesn’t truly mean God is behind, Jesus is
losing or the Holy Spirit is taking a few days off. It means we are living in a time when
culture’s most aggressive, pervasive and powerful communicators do not intimately
know God, Christ, the Bible, Church or religion. They’ve heard of it but don’t know it. They certainly don’t trust it; it’s just an
opinion.
Thus has arisen today’s quasi-god
culture that freely invokes divine-sounding expressions – “You are a blessing
to me,” “May god bless you,” “I pray to god,” “God help us,” “Jesus Christ!”
(the expletive) and many others – without a second thought as to their true
divine meaning, the divine realness of who and what they are talking about, and
the eternal efficacy of figuring out divine truth in the context of their words.
Truly knowing God, you see, is a
good thing.
Instead people emptily, mindlessly,
chat up “faith” or “belief” without offering the bedrock context of something
really big out there worth faithfully believing in: a true, righteous,
relational and loving all-powerful God. Secular
folks intone small godly bon mots
with sincerity of their own earnest but shallow purpose, or to encourage others
as an expression of compassion. They
offer nice words that have no cosmic juice.
And it is shake-that-person-by-the-shoulders
maddening to see how little they understand about and expect from God. God is relationship, Jesus Christ is
explanation and the Holy Spirit is wisdom.
This God is the biggest thing
going. Faith and belief are only a small
start, maybe a sacrifice bunt, toward learning what God means in our life now
and forever. It is trust and
relationship that awaken the true “swinging for the fences” powerhouse of
intimately knowing God with our heart, mind, soul and strength.
There is no opinion poll that can
track that. Paying lip service to some
god as we express a sincere personal intention about some worldly concern is a
stillborn exercise of vanity; a baseless hope.
A seeking human heart’s love and thirst for Jesus, on the other hand, is
the thundering long-ball of infinite, eternal trust and relationship.
That is the faith and belief –
God’s Grand Slam – that will get you home.
Walters
(rlwcom@aol.com) notes baseball starts soon. Polls suggest the Cubs are 4-1 favorites to
repeat as World Series champions.
Anybody got an Amen?
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